What is wxBlogger?
wxBlogger is a blogging/journaling application designed to be both cross platform (working on this now), and user extensible. I designed wxBlogger with the hope that people would take the initiative to develop their own XSLT transforms, for customized output. I've also made it easy for people to include extra information about these transforms, so that they can recieve credit for those. wxBlogger can output text, XML, RSS, and XML transformed by XSLT (typically used to export HTML).
wxBlogger has a built in interface for uploading to FTP sites, and other protocols are in development.
Why the "wx"?
wxBlogger was built using wxWindows a cross platform GUI (and more) toolkit. This means that pretty soon I'll be getting MacOS and Linux versions of wxBlogger built. I've also only made use of libraries that are also cross-platform (Xerces and Xalan), which will hopefully speed the migration to new platforms.
XSLT Huh?
If you've used HTML (not a WYSIWYG one), you'll feel right at home. There are also many XSLT editors out there, as well as resources on using XSLT. Here are a few that I've found helpful.
- The W3C XSLT Website (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt)
- The makers of XML Spy, a very cool XSLT editor/debugger (http://www.altova.com/features_xsl.html). Unfortunately it costs money. :(
What about features?
wxBlogger makes use of an ODBC database as it's primary sorce of data storage. This makes it very scalable, and able to handle large amounts of data without necissarily consuming a large amount of resources. It also means that if you'd like to develop another program or web-based-interface to interact with wxBlogger's database, you are free to do so.
In the future I've thought about moving wxBlogger over to an entirely XML based storage system. I haven't recieved too much feedback about it though, so I have no idea if that's something people would like to see or not. Regardless, it would certainly make platform-specific issues much less likely to happen.
More features please.
wxBlogger supports both multiple users and multiple identities per user. This can be used as a method for grouping entries, as well as in the future providing an interface for customization.
How do I format my entries?
wxBlogger has "tags" defined that allow you to mark certain sections of your entries in different ways. This allows wxBlogger to output XML that can be interpreted to add formating, instead of locking you into one particular method of formatting. This means that if you decided later on that you didn't like how your links were being formatted in the HTML output, you could make a single change in your XSLT file, and that change would be reflected the next time you exported your blog.
wxBlogger currently has the following "tags" defined:
- [emphasis:"Important Text"]
- [link:"Check out this cool site!","http://www.wxwindows.org/"]
- [insert:"Party_At_The_Lake.jpg"]
- [quote:"Good or bad, thinking makes it so."]
How do I publish my entries?
When publishing your entries either to TEXT, XML, RSS, or HTML (via XSLT Transforms), you can apply filters based upon identity, and entry date. This allows you to group your journal entries however you like. If enough people are interested in other methods of filtering their entries, then it is possible that I could expose more filtering methods in the future.
Screen Shots?
- Main Screen
- Main Screen Showing Attachments
- Main Screen Showing Render Preview
- Publish Dialog
- FTP Publish Dialog
- XSLT Selector Dialog
- RSS Export Dialog
Download?
Right here baby.
wxBlogger has been updated to automatically setup database settings if they are not found. Please read the READ ME.txt file for additional information about wxBlogger. The most recent update is version 0.8.0 which was uploaded Thursday, August 7, 2003.
The current READ ME.txt, in case you're curious.